SynBioBeta Speaker
Christina Smolke
Antheia
CEO & Co-Founder
Christina is a pioneer in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, where she has over 20 years of experience. As Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, her laboratory led the breakthrough research to engineer baker’s yeast to produce some of the most complex and valuable medicines known. Under her leadership, Antheia's advanced biosynthesis platform enables new possibilities for drug discovery and efficient, sustainable, transparent, and on-demand drug manufacturing at scale. Her vision and accomplishments have garnered numerous awards, including the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, Nature’s 10, Novozymes Award for Excellence in Biochemical Engineering, and TR35 Award.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Christina
This Year
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Tools & Tech
Engineering Resilient Pharma Supply Chains with Biology
For decades, pharmaceutical supply chains were optimized for cost and scale, stretching across continents to source critical active ingredients. But fragility has made resilience a strategic imperative. Synthetic biology offers a new model: onshoring the production of essential APIs by programming cells to manufacture small molecules, peptides, and novel amino acids with precision and scalability. Instead of relying on distant chemical supply networks, biology becomes the factory—flexible, distributed, and programmable. This session explores how engineered microbes and directed evolution platforms are rebuilding pharma supply chains from the molecular level up, enabling secure, responsive, and locally anchored production of the medicines the world depends on.
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Featuring
Ola Wlodek
Constructive Bio
CEO
Leader in Non-Canonical Amino Acids and genome design
Christina Smolke
Antheia
CEO & Co-Founder
Synthetic-biology pioneer decoupling medicines from fragile supply chains.
Tina Boville
Aralez Bio
Co-founder & CEO
Enzyme engineer expanding peptide chemistry’s noncanonical frontier.
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Tools & Tech
Engineering Resilient Pharma Supply Chains with Biology
For decades, pharmaceutical supply chains were optimized for cost and scale, stretching across continents to source critical active ingredients. But fragility has made resilience a strategic imperative. Synthetic biology offers a new model: onshoring the production of essential APIs by programming cells to manufacture small molecules, peptides, and novel amino acids with precision and scalability. Instead of relying on distant chemical supply networks, biology becomes the factory—flexible, distributed, and programmable. This session explores how engineered microbes and directed evolution platforms are rebuilding pharma supply chains from the molecular level up, enabling secure, responsive, and locally anchored production of the medicines the world depends on.
Get a Ticket
Featuring
Ola Wlodek
Constructive Bio
CEO
Leader in Non-Canonical Amino Acids and genome design
Christina Smolke
Antheia
CEO & Co-Founder
Synthetic-biology pioneer decoupling medicines from fragile supply chains.
Tina Boville
Aralez Bio
Co-founder & CEO
Enzyme engineer expanding peptide chemistry’s noncanonical frontier.
Session lineup still growing
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
